“Down Here Near the End of Staten Island”: Dorothy Day on the Beach and on the Page

By David Allen

Aerial Map, 1924 (New York Public Library)

In the Map Division of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue is a 1924 survey of New York conducted by the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation for the City’s Office of the Chief Engineer. If you look closely at plate 33C, you will see the section of Staten Island’s South Shore that stretches along Raritan Bay from Seguine Point to Arbutus Lake: a crescent of white beach, a few houses, trees, and fields offering a buffer from more developed neighborhoods closer to Amboy Road and the Huguenot Station of the Staten Island Railroad.

It’s not possible to make out the “tin-roofed fisherman’s shack” Dorothy Day purchased the same year with money for the motion picture rights to The Eleventh Virgin (1924) — a movie never made based on a novel Day would later claim to hope that no one would ever read. Minus a few months spent in Hollywood and Mexico, Day would live here until 1931, when she moved with her daughter Tamar to East 15th Street. 

Dorothy Day near first Staten Island cottage (Marquette University Archives)

“Down here near the end of Staten Island,” as she described it, Day found a tolerant, bohemian, and international neighborhood. Nearby lived Mike Gold, author of Jews Without Money, the painter, Peggy Baird and her husband, writer Malcolm Cowley, as well as Sasha, Freda, and Dickie, Russian and German Jews who were her closest neighbors. Smiddy, a fisherman and beachcomber lived in a shack on the beach; he kept a steamer chair especially for Day’s visits.

This was the setting for her romance with Forster Batterham, the birth of her only child, Tamar, and her conversion to Catholicism. These events brought joy, but also despair — especially for the demise of her relationship with Batterham.

This part of Day’s life on Staten Island has been written about extensively, by Day herself in From Union Square to Rome (1938) and The Long Loneliness (1952), as well as others. In Commonweal last year, Anne Klejment revived “True Story Fictionalized,” a series Day wrote, along with a gardening column, for the Staten Island Advance describing a fictional family (the “Days”) dealing with Depression-era challenges and reveling in the natural beauty and bounty of the bay.

But Day’s connection to Staten Island was lifelong. This piece traces the island’s significance in her life and in her writing.

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 In 1935, the Catholic Worker rented a large house on a half-acre of land, which Day described in Loaves and Fishes (1963) as “perched on a little knoll overlooking Raritan Bay.” In his memoir, Wings of the Dawn (1979), Day’s longtime Catholic Worker colleague and friend Stanley Vishnewski described Staten Island then as New York City’s “last frontier… Small rural villages and commercial farms dotted the island.”

The “garden commune” lasted barely a year. In 1936, a donation allowed the group to purchase a larger property in Easton, Pennsylvania. But fifteen years later, the Catholic Worker returned to Staten Island, establishing the Peter Maurin Farm in Rossville, a few miles from the shore. Named for Day’s early mentor, the 20-acre farm provided vegetables and bread for the Worker’s House of Hospitality in Manhattan, while also serving as the housing annex for Catholic Workers and those in their care, a summer camp, and a retreat center.

That farm lasted until 1964. But with the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge easy access came to Staten Island by car and bus. Small farms like the Catholic Worker’s gave way to tracts of identical suburban homes. Increasing property taxes forced the Worker to sell the farm, but allowed it to buy another property upstate in Tivoli. Day wrote that with the opening of the bridge, “we moved into the “mansion class,” since there was an old dilapidated mansion on the new property. More ruefully she wrote, “There were so many associations with Staten Island that I hated to move.”

Along with the farm, Day sold two bungalows she had purchased in 1957, less than a mile from her first cottage. The houses sat above Annandale beach, at the corner of Barat Lane (now Zephyr Avenue) and Poillon Avenue. Across the way was the Beachcomber, formerly Barat’s Hotel and, before that, a speakeasy during the days when bootleggers would drop anchor off the Island’s remote South Shore.

Marge Hughes, a Catholic Worker lived in the second bungalow with her five children. According Marge’s daughter, Johannah Hughes Turner, the bungalows were at first “little more than shacks for summertime beach use. But by 1961, they were gradually improved with modern plumbing and insulation for year-round use.” As a girl, Rachel de Aragon, niece of Day’s brother John, would visit the Hughes family. The second bungalow was kept primarily as a “retreat house for Dorothy, her quiet spot” — a place where she would not to be inundated with people, as she would be in the city or even at the farm. “It was a phenomenal little corner of Staten Island,” Rachel remembers, “a really pretty stretch of beach, a gift you’ve been given in your life. The freedom of it. Dorothy had that, felt it.”

In the early 1970s, the Worker bought two small cottages in the Spanish Camp, established in the 1920s by a collective of émigré workers, the Spanish Naturopath Society, as a place for their families to escape the city during the hot summer months. In 1977, Catholic Workers Patrick and Kathleen Jordan rented a third bungalow so that they could assist Dorothy when she came to stay. “It felt like a peasant village,” Kathleen recalls. “People sat out in front of their bungalows, and the women would be in a little circle and chat-chat-chat.”

Despite this active social scene, Day’s references to Staten Island in her “On Pilgrimage” columns evoked a sense of isolation. But for Day, this was not a feeling to be despised; it was one she had long cherished. In October 1958, she wrote: “One of the joys of Staten Island is that one can get down there after a grueling day in New York, and for thirty-five cents find oneself on a deserted beach.” Nearly twenty years later, she noted tersely: “Alone all day. A sudden storm in the night. Vast dark clouds, and a glaring lightning flash with thunder. No rain. Reading Dr. Zhivago.” The next year, in one of her last columns from the beach, she described “a quiet day — pouring rain and high winds — not a fishing boat on the bay — not a soul stirring on the beach or in the neighborhood.”

Day was not entirely isolated. At the Barat Lane bungalow, she had the Hughes family, as well as visitors from the City or sometimes abroad. Still, Rachel de Aragon remembers Marge telling her as a child, “‘Dorothy is here this weekend. If you are playing house, keep off her porch.’” It was a place for Day to talk quietly around the table with close friends. “She probably did write there, answer letters there,” Rachel recalled, “but mostly it was a place to sit and think.”

Later, Day would have the Jordans as neighbors in the Spanish Camp. There were also visits from “her doctor, current and old friends and associates, relatives, an occasional ‘notable,’ and staffers of the Worker house in the city,” according to Johannah Hughes Turner. In Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty, Day’s granddaughter Kate Hennessy describes her first visit in 1977, with Tamar and Dorothy walking barefoot along the beach — when Day felt strong enough — reminiscing about the Staten Island beach they had known during Tamar’s childhood.

It is not surprising that the relative isolation Day found on Staten Island would appeal to one who spent so much of her life in crowded rooms at the Catholic Worker’s Houses of Hospitality, on long bus rides, in street protests, and even in jail. Wherever she went, Day was surrounded by colleagues, acolytes, and well-wishers. Even on Staten Island, not everyone respected the unspoken rule that Day was to be left alone. “Sometimes people would just show up at the cottage,” Patrick Jordan remembers.

Day at the Spanish Camp, 1978 (photograph by Stanley Vishnewski)

Day often quoted Saint Teresa of Avila, “Life is but a night spent in an uncomfortable inn, crowded together with other wayfarers.” This was certainly the life Day chose, physically and mentally exhausting. Staten Island provided Day with a necessary escape. Jim Forest, a Catholic Worker and Day biographer, describes her as a “part-time hermit.” In her Staten Island shack, as well as the cottages that succeeded it, “she  had the space to be by herself, to think and pray and write.”

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Day’s late columns for the Catholic Worker, because of her physical decline, are fragmentary, largely comprising excerpts from her diaries. A January 1975 column gives a sense for what Staten Island meant to her: “Really I am to be envied. I am spending a good deal of my time at a little three-room house on the beach, not too far away, where I can enjoy the beauties of sunrise over the bay and the sunset, which, alas, comes all too early every afternoon.”    

In May 1978, from her room at Maryhouse, the Catholic Worker house for women in Manhattan, she wrote, “The little sycamore tree across the street is budding. I have some potted plants in my room and comfortable chairs, and lots of books and company. But I am restless for the Staten Island beach.” Another, dated July-August 1978: “Breakers rolling in on the beach—the air is damp—a flannel nightgown and two blankets are necessary if the windows are open.”  And still later: “Opera on the radio—‘Tannhäuser.’ The bay is filled with an uncountable number of sailboats.”

In September that year, she asked if  “On Pilgrimage” should be retitled, “‘On the Beach—or ‘On the Shelf?’” More seriously, she wrote, “It is good sitting out on the red bench in front of the bungalow, overlooking the water. Lovely sounds of birds in the trees, especially at nightfall.” Later that same month, she would describe waking early to the sound of a cricket on her windowsill, bringing her mind back to “my very early happy days on the beach in Staten Island (long before there was a Catholic Worker).”

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You wouldn’t have needed any blankets at all on the sweltering mid-August evening I went down to the former Spanish Camp, 41 years since Day’s last summer there.  There is little left of the place she knew: a few McMansions sit forlornly among foundations and potential building sites. The process to preserve as landmarks Day’s cottage and several others was scuttled by the developer who purchased the land from the Society.

Beach at former Spanish Camp, 2019 (photograph by author)

The ruins of several cottages from Day’s time remain along a dirt road leading towards the beach, along with one that appears partially inhabited. Pushing through a few yards of brush and rubble just beyond where the Catholic Worker’s cottages stood, I made it to the narrow beach over which Day would have looked out from her cottage windows or, with help, made it down rickety wooden stairs to walk on the beach. There were a few broken tiles and a discarded tire. Aside from some seagulls and Canadian Geese, I was alone.

Day’s early days on the beach in Staten Island brought her joy but were also a time of confusion about the direction her life would take — to remain with Forster, unmarried but part of a loving family, and within the circle of communist friends and comrades, or to renounce these for a new life as a Catholic — a fateful decision not only for her but for countless people touched by her and the Catholic Worker movement.

In her early days on the beach, she read William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, and was inspired by the lives of saints illustrated in the book. Day certainly would have recognized herself in James’s description of the “divided self” — a struggle between one’s inner lives, “the natural and the spiritual” — that precedes conversion, and for a very few, saintliness. In one diary entry, she described a pleasant day “rowing about in the calm bay with Forster. The oyster boats were all out, and far on the horizon, off Sandy Hook, there was a four-masted vessel … I had the curious delusion that several huge holes has been stove in [the ship’s] side, through which you could see the blue sky. The other vessels seemed [to be] sailing in the air, quite indifferent to the horizon on which they should properly have been resting.”  

Day’s “curious delusion” appears to signal her divided self at the time. Her sensation of seeing through the solidity of the ship’s hull upsets the serenity of the otherwise idyllic experience she describes. By contrast, her descriptions of her final times on Staten Island, despite their fragmentary rendering, testify to a sense of peace and wholeness — what James described as the “smooth waters of inner peace and unity” —  that unites with memories of early days at the beach, reading and listening to music, appreciating nature, and contemplating the openness and mystery of the sea.

In one of her last columns, she writes: “‘In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.’ Looking out over the bay, the gulls, the ‘paths in the sea,’ the tiny ripples stirring a patch of water here and there, the reflections of clouds on the surface—how beautiful it is.”

Dorothy Day died November 29, 1980, and is buried in Resurrection Cemetery in Staten Island, overlooking Raritan Bay.

The author thanks Kathleen and Patrick Jordan, Rachel de Aragon, Johannah Hughes Turner, Jim Forest, and Kate Hennessy.

David Allen is an associate professor of English Education at the College of Staten Island.